Brokenness and Wholeness

Not One, Not Two

photo by Micky Duxbury

Finding wholeness through embracing brokenness

People often tell me that what they appreciate in my books and writings is my willingness to expose my own struggles, neurosis and brokenness. I often feel like I was destined to explore brokenness. My right hand was amputated in the uterus by an amniotic strand probably toward the end of my mother’s pregnancy, so in a sense, I was born broken.

Not surprisingly, one of my most deeply rooted core beliefs is that I am fundamentally imperfect. Through years of therapy and meditation, this belief has gradually dissolved, although I can’t say it is entirely gone, but I eventually came to see the beauty and perfection of my right arm being exactly as it is. I’ve recognized that in many ways, all of this has been a blessing, for it has helped me to understand the nature of human suffering. When we believe we are separate fragments in a fragmented world, we inevitably feel incomplete and deficient even if we have a perfect body. As I wrote in my first book:

My absent hand was a kind of ticket as it turned out. I was given a passport to marginal worlds, to the realms of the dispossessed, to the secret rooms of people's hearts where something is always missing or misshapen. But it was many years before I realized this. In the beginning, I just knew that I stood out like a sore thumb and that nobody was supposed to mention it.

—from Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

In my late teens and early adulthood, I nearly died from alcohol addiction. At age 77, the fingerbiting compulsion that I’ve had since childhood still happens, albeit less severely. But again, over many years, I’ve come to see the gift of addiction and compulsion. It has shown me the nature of our most basic human problem (not wanting what we have, and wanting what we don’t have), as well as both the illusion of free will and the possibility of transformation. It has shown me the transformative power of awareness, what Eckhart Tolle calls the power of Now.

People tell me they appreciate when I share my brokenness because it helps them feel less alone and less judgmental about their own brokenness. The danger in my continuing to do this is when it comes from or feeds into that core belief about imperfection and any lingering tendency to identify myself as a “Broken Person.” Then it becomes a way of hiding from the scary side of acknowledging, revealing and speaking as the True Self, this boundless aware presence and wholeness. As Gangaji pointed out to me some years ago, it can be safer to be “just little ole fucked up me.” People won’t expect as much. They won’t criticize me because I’m already down. It can be a way of avoiding responsibility and keeping myself small.

So it’s a dance, acknowledging our humanity while not making it into a fixed identity. I do think it’s important for spiritual teachers in particular to reveal our humanity, and not come off as perfect and totally resolved. And discovering the broken places in our teachers can be an important part of the teaching, when the idealized version collapses and we are left with life as it is, which is inevitably messy and apparently imperfect. There are no perfect people, except in the sense that everything is perfect just as it is.

Some spiritual systems seem to focus on totally transcending ordinary life and being in perpetual bliss, but Buddhism is radically different. Buddhism teaches that life always involves suffering, in obvious and subtle forms. Even when things seem good, we know it may all change tomorrow. When we satisfy one desire, a new craving arises. Buddhism teaches that suffering comes from the mistaken belief that things, ourselves included, are separate, independent, and solid. Buddhism encourages us to be with life just as it is, and to fully experience and explore the actuality of this one bottomless moment here and now. If fear shows up, then we can fully taste and explore fear. If anger shows up, then we can fully taste and explore anger. If we are in pain, we can explore pain. We’re always finding the transcendent right here in life as it is.

My first Zen teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman told me that “settling in and penetrating to the root is very important.” He said, “Our suffering is our inability to settle. Suffering is believing there's a way out." He also told me, "We're always looking for diamonds in the mud. But actually the mud itself is pretty interesting. That's what Zen practice is about. The mud."

I’ve shared a beautiful quote from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview with Leonard Cohen before, but it’s worth sharing again. Leonard was a Zen monk for a number of years, so he was steeped in that Buddhist perspective:

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

– Leonard Cohen

Typically, we look at brokenness, whether in ourselves or in the world, from the imagined perspective of a separate self in a fractured world. We judge the brokenness and want to fix or escape from it. We often feel guilt or blame about it. As Byron Katie likes to say, we argue with reality. We’re not seeing the whole picture—how it all goes together, the light and the dark—and we’re reacting from a place of separation, desire and fear. We attack and defend, seek and resist, take sides, feel anger and hatred, and thus compound the pain.

When we see from wholeness, we see the whole picture. We’re no longer relating to the brokenness as brokenness. We’re beholding it from love and responding to it with love. We have compassion for everyone, for all sides in a conflict, for ourselves and others. We know that this is how it is right now, and that at this moment, it could not be otherwise, that everyone is truly blameless. We see everything as our own self, not as an “other” that is threatening us or what we believe. We are open, like a mirror that accepts everything and clings to nothing. And there is a warmth in this mirror-like awareness, an open-heartedness.

I often marvel at how Christianity uses the cross, a torture instrument, as the symbol of the religion. Central to Christianity is the journey of God incarnate from the crucifixion to the resurrection, and we don’t need to take it all literally, it can be seen in part as a beautiful myth. In the story, when Jesus emerged from the tomb, he invited his disciples to touch his wounds. This wasn’t something to avoid, but something to go into deeply, to feel and fully experience, and in this meeting with the deepest wounds, in surrendering on the cross, there is the resurrection, the movement from brokenness to wholeness. Not by denying the cross, but by taking it up fully.

Of course, this doesn’t mean not taking an aspirin, seeing a therapist, treating an illness, or working for some kind of social justice. It simply means doing all this in a very different spirit, from a very different perspective. It means right now leaving the spinning thoughts and resistance behind and letting go, relaxing, settling, waking up to the alive presence and the suchness of this very moment. Awareness is the great transformative power. It works not by will or forceful effort, but by illuminating and embracing everything, just as it is.

Life can be downright hard sometimes. The bodymind is subject to all kinds of pain and painful circumstances. Human beings endure unimaginable suffering at times. I feel it’s important to validate the reality of this pain and the fact that it can’t always be cured, and certainly not by merely wishing it away or throwing platitudes at it. But somehow, even the worst suffering can be endured and sometimes it can be transformed.

The spiritual journey is about discovering what creates suffering and what transforms it. Reading about this can be a helpful pointer lighting the way home, but it’s an exploration and a discovery that we must each undertake for ourselves. Luckily, we’re not alone. We’re one whole undivided happening. We’re all in this together. We all need each other. No one exists independently of the whole.

Thank you to all of you for being here, for listening, and for all your love and support. I couldn’t do this without you. We all matter more than we realize.

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NOTHING TO GRASP is currently being featured on Stillness Speaks

As I’ve mentioned, my book Nothing to Grasp, originally published in 2012, has just come out in a new edition. It’s the same text but with a new cover and more affordable price. You can read three excerpts from the book here on Stillness Speaks:

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Love to all…